The Future of Scientific Computing

Summary The computer, though with us only about twenty years, is an integral part of our society. It has evolved in these twenty years from early devices, in which storage for even a few hundred characters represented the ultimate in design, to a machine capable of storing millions of alphanumeric characters which are callable in microseconds. With such machines now, and more highly advanced machines promised, we are able to do numerical weather prediction for a few days, and are looking to extend this to prediction over a span of a month. This will be possible as we design machines with more built in operations, greater storage capacity, and more flexible input-output devices. As machines acquire these capabilities, we are finding it possible for several users to share the machine simultaneously in a direct way formerly known as‘debugging at the console'. This technique, formerly thought to be wasteful of machine time, has allowed rapid resolution of subtle programming errors, and facilitates discovery of methods of attack on certain problems. An important consequence of this technique is the possibility of using the machine to teach students.